Megan Franklyn

Assistant Principal

Early Help

Support when your family needs it provided by Family Life (www.familylife.com.au)

What is it?

This is a brief (10 session) support service to support families in accessing programs and services in their community. E.g. information and advice on parenting support, peer support programs etc.

Please see below flyer for how to access this service or email them at earlyhelp@familylife.com.au if you have any further questions. Please note, at this stage you need to be a resident in the City of Kingston, Mornington Peninsula Shire, Frankston City or Bayside City to access the service.

Also, as communicated via Compass and in the attached flyer, there is an online session available called ‘Creating Confident Kids’ on Zoom on the 3rd of May from 7pm. This will provide some strategies to help your child with anger and anxiety, you’ll learn more about resilience and receive tips on building resilience and much much more.

Student Focus Groups

Mrs Sharon Lomas and I had the pleasure of running our student focus groups this term during which we spoke to around 20 students from years 3 to 6 on Wellbeing within our school. We were delighted to hear the students name our three new school wide expected behaviours of respect, empathy and resilience. Students shared some of the topics that they have been covering in their weekly wellbeing lessons which included identifying emotions, identifying personal strengths, how body language can help you know how to communicate with someone, the importance of taking care of others and the importance of showing someone that you’re sorry not just saying the words.

Students spoke about positive behaviours that they had seen in the playground including children helping each other, taking care of someone who is hurt, asking someone to come and play if they’re sitting away, and playing with different people. They could explain that the yard duty teacher was there to help them but especially our senior students explained that they would try to resolve minor issues themselves.

The final part of our discussion was how teachers show that they care. This included the teacher letting them lead the learning, checking in on them, letting them know their opinions matter, finding out what is wrong, talking about highlights of the week, helping the children find a solution, giving you a bandaid if you’re hurt, and helping you to calm yourself down.

One of the main parts of our focus groups was helping children to understand that when they shared during these types of discussions, that their words had impact. So our next step is to determine what actions we as a school could now take.

School Wide Positive Behaviours Update

We are thrilled that we have been able to introduce our three school wide expected behaviours in first term this year. They are - Be respectful, be resilient and be empathetic.

There are lots of classroom displays of these words and students have been exploring what they mean and what they might look like in school. We have since been working on our matrix of behaviours, which has lots of statements of what these behaviours look like in different areas of our school. So far, our Wellbeing Priority Team and School Leadership Team have had input into this document. Our next step is student and parent consultation through further focus groups and our Student Learning and Wellbeing subcommittee.

Invitation to joining Student Learning and Wellbeing Subcommittee:

Sharon Lomas and I would love to invite any interested parents or carers to join our Student Learning and Wellbeing subcommittee of the school council. You may be wondering what we do as part of a subcommittee!

We review a range of policies, discuss the teaching, learning and wellbeing that is happening in the school, look at data collected from official and unofficial surveys and focus groups and invite feedback on a range of school initiatives.

We generally meet on a Tuesday night at 6pm and can offer either an in person or WebEx meeting to accommodate different people’s schedules.

If you’re interested please contact me via email at megan.franklyn@education.vic.gov.au

Whilst Mr Cox, Principal, is on leave, I look forward to supporting the school as Acting Principal from Wednesday 29th March until the end of term.

Stir Crazy Kids